At 01:50 PM 1/3/01 -0600, Thomas Herron wrote:
>I would still love to hear what Prof. Helgerson had to say.
I enjoyed this talk a great deal, and took down some notes afterward. I
transcribe them here in the hope that my omissions and misprisions will
meet with correction. Needless to say, I've omitted all the examples.
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Richard Helgerson
"Spenser's Strangeness"
Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture
Delivered to the International Spenser Society
Washington, D.C. 29 Dec. 2000
1. Began by noting that there were three definitions of "empire" operative
in Spenser's time: (a) rule (imperium), (b) national sovereignty or
territorial integrity, and (c) the imposition of imperium on other countries.
2. Petrarch was associated with the restoration of the Roman Empire (cf.
his enthusiasm for Cola di Rienzo).
3. In the sixteenth century, poets in Spain, France, and England enriched
their own vernaculars with Petrarchanisms, thereby claiming imperial status
for their respective national languages. Or to put it another way, and more
paradoxically, in order to make their languages imperial, vernacular
authors needed to make them strange (viz., foreign).
When asked about the irony of adopting an Italian model to further imperial
designs at a period when Italy was a political joke, Helgerson suggested
that Italy's political weakness probably made adoption of its literary
forms easier: Italy was not a political competitor in the sixteenth
century, so borrowing its culture did not constitute a political concession.
When asked about the Chaucerian element in Spenser's verse, Helgerson
observed that if Spenser had stopped at importing the Italian features, he
would have seemed normal (that is, "Renaissance") to us, his modern
students. It was the added medieval (Chaucerian) strangeness that _kept_
Spenser strange.
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David Wilson-Okamura http://geoffreychaucer.org [log in to unmask]
Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources
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